One of the new features for Cheetah is the inclusion of severaladditional datablades. One of the more exciting of these blades is theBasic Text Search blade, BTS for short. This datablade allowsyou to do a lot of searches on text data found in char,varchar, lvarchar, blob and clob datatypes. The intent is to provide amore robust method by which to search text than current forms like theMATCHES or LIKE functions. The documentationfor the BTS blade can be found in TheBuilt-In DataBlade Modules User's Guide . Today we willgo over a little of the syntax that allows you to perform some neatqueries.

At the heart of the BTS datablade is a single function. The name isbts_contains, and it has the following syntax:

bts_contains (<column to search>, <searchcriteria>, {score # REAL})

The score section at the end is optional, and what it does is allow youto give a weighted value to each member of your result set.So let's presume that you had a varchar(255) column called remarks in atable called photos. If you wanted to search for the words "Apple" orthe phrase "Macbook Pro" , and you only wanted the score of 70.0 or greater you would do the following: